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Smart Residential Load Simulator (SRLS)

License agreement

This program is provided without charge for testing purposes only. The program or any of its parts may not be used for any commercial applications.

The authors would appreciate any comments and suggestions on how to improve the program. Any reports of problems should be directed to the authors, who reserve their right to modify the program at any time without previous notification.

Disclaimer: The authors do not guarantee the accuracy of the results obtained with this program, nor its performance.

Brief program description

The SRLS is a tool developed under the auspices of The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) that facilitates the study of energy management systems in smart grids based on Matlab-Simulink-GUIDE toolboxes. This provides a complete set of user-friendly graphical interfaces to properly model and study smart:

Thermostats

Air conditioners

Furnaces

Water heaters

Refrigerators

Stoves

Dish washers

Cloth washers

Dryers

Lights

Poolpumps

As well as wind, solar, and battery sources of power generation in residential houses. The impact of different variables such as ambient temperature, solar radiation, and household activity levels that considerably contribute to energy consumption are also considered. The simulator allows to model the way appliances consume power and helps to understand how these contribute to peak demand providing individual and total energy consumption and costs, allowing as well to assess the value and impact of generated power by residential power sources. This freeware platform can be a useful tool for researchers and educators to validate and demonstrate models for residential energy management and optimization, and can also be used by residential customers to model and understand energy consumption profiles in households.

Help and tutorials

The program has been designed to run with Matlab-Simulink R2012 or higher; please note that older versions of Matlab-Simulink may yield warning/fatal errors (e.g. Matlab R2009). To get it started, start Matlab and change the folder to the directory where you unzipped the program, and then type the main program name "Smart_Residential_Load_Simulator" on the Matlab console. This will start the Graphical User Interface (GUI), which includes some help and demos.

To learn how the program works, two demos are provided with the simulator. To review them and run them, click on the Case 1 and/or Case 2 tabs, which describe the examples. Clicking the Continue tab will load the demo data, which can then be run in the main simulator window by pressing on the Run tab. It'll take a few seconds, depending on your machine, to run the simulation, after which you can press the Plot tab which will trigger a new window with a variety of plots where you can select the variables you wish to graph.

If you have any problems, we might be able to help you depending on availability and time constraints. Email J. Miguel Gonzalez describing your problems and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.